Get personalized book recommendations based on your reading history and preferences. Our algorithm analyzes your favorite books and reading patterns to suggest your next great read.

“Scapegoats” is a category for books that center on people or groups unfairly blamed, sacrificed, or set up to carry a community’s fear, guilt, or failure. It explores how accusations take hold—through prejudice, rumor, power imbalances, moral panics, and groupthink—and what that blame does to both the targeted and the crowd. Spanning fiction and nonfiction, it includes framed-protagonist thrillers, allegories of ostracism, histories of witch hunts and show trials, true-crime miscarriages of justice, and memoirs of family or workplace scapegoating. Recurring themes include gaslighting, propaganda, institutional betrayal, complicity, resistance, and the possibilities of accountability, vindication, or tragic loss. As a genre, it asks why societies create “fall guys,” how they are made, and what it takes to break the cycle.

Filter books by their publication year. Enter the earliest year (Start) and latest year (End) to find books published within that period. Leave either field empty to search from the beginning of time or up to the present day.